charl-e-original icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
charl-e-original copied to clipboard

CHARL-E: an App that runs Stable Diffusion on your Mac

charl-e

NOTE: the updated repo is now at https://github.com/cbh123/charl-e

Charl-E is an ElectronJS app that allows you to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. No setup scripts or other downloads necessary! It works by packaging Stable Diffusion as a python executable, which is then called by the electron app. The executable lives in ./dist/txt2img.

You can download it here: https://www.charl-e.com

I'm working on making this faster and making the UI cleaner.

Troubleshooting

  • After downloading, make sure you drag it into the applications folder. It won't work until you do that.
  • You may get a warning about malicious code. To bypass this, you can right click on the app and select 'Open'. I realize this sounds suspicious but in order to get rid of the warning I need to get Apple to 'notarize' the app which is a little tricky. Stay tuned.

To Run

If you don't want to download the DMG and would rather set it up yourself, it's easy!

From your command line:

# Clone this repository
git clone [https://github.com/electron/electron-quick-start](https://github.com/cbh123/charl-e)
# Go into the repository
cd charl-e

Next you'll need to download the weights from hugging face. You can find them here. Download sd-v1-4.ckpt and move it to the /models folder in this directory.

Finally:

# Install dependencies
npm install
# Run the app
npm start

You should be good to go.

License

CC0 1.0 (Public Domain)

charl-e